Imperfection
by larkfare
Summary: When Sarah O'Brien's past comes back to haunt her, will she be able to protect the only truly blameless person in her life? Cora/O'Brien, rating may go up.
1. Prologue

**Disclaimer: I don't own ****_Downton Abbey_****.**

_1890_

Sunlight streamed through the narrow window, casting a pallid rectangle on the floorboards. Dustmites danced in the early morning glow, incandescent in their fervor. The smell of perfume lingered in the upholstery, and she inhaled deeply, as if to breathe the atmosphere into her very bones. The scent mingled with that emanating from the half-drunk bottle on the dressing table, and, for the first time in her life, and during this, the briefest of moments, she almost felt beautiful.

But beauty was and is a temporal thing. The only constant, in this life and in any other, was obligation, and so it was that, sighing, she peeled the sheets away from her body, and sat up, ushering in the inevitable headache. The sun passed behind a cloud as she brushed a resigned hand over her face, sweeping a stray hair back into place, and she was plain once more. A servant, that was all. Devoted. Inconsequential. Swinging her legs out from under her, she began to retrieve her hastily discarded clothing, silently cursing herself for not taking better care of the few things she was permitted to own. As she buttoned her ancient, sturdy blouse; pretty, in its way, but unremarkable; as she dressed up in the costume of her every day life, so she got into character, into the role she had been allotted in some divine idea of a joke. The farm girl, the servant, the rich man's crutch. A woman, yes, but never a lady.

She couldn't bring herself to be irritated by the ladder she found in her stocking; merely ran a finger along it, a faint echo of the previous evening's touch, and felt nothing but empty. Immune. Impenetrable. She crept to the door, but turned back as she did, allowing herself a final glance at the figure in the bed. Now here was a true thing of beauty. Raven hair spilling across the pillow; creamy skin spread evenly over impossible limbs that claimed more than their fair share of the mattress. Eyes, shut now, but, when opened, clear blue, and yet inscrutable, like lakes frozen over. The church bells chimed the hour, and she smiled, for she was not yet to know that she would come sorely to regret this moment, not today perhaps, and not tomorrow, either, but for the rest of her life, regardless.


	2. Fear

_1912_

Sarah O'Brien was afraid. It was not a feeling that she would have admitted to, and neither was she much acquainted with it, but it was there, nonetheless, lurking in the shadowy corners of the murkiest recesses of her mind. She was not what one might call a sympathetic woman; indeed, it might not have seemed far beyond the realm of imagination that she could have brought the entire vessel down singlehandedly, had it suited her, but on that fateful night, she dreamed of horrors untold. She did have a heart, contrary as it may have been to popular belief, and it beat rapidly out of time and in all the wrong places. There was darkness in her, that much was true; a certain venom that was wont to course through her veins, but that, surely, was true of all people, to varying degrees. They were, by nature, imperfect beings, never quite one thing or another, existing, as they did, in the perpetual purgatory of this blighted world. Her own demons may torment her, but they were nothing, she could tell, compared to what was to come, and she woke with a jolt at precisely twenty past two in the morning, unable to quell the sense of dread that descended and settled within her.

Morning came, and with it the news that the unsinkable ship had sunk, and all at once it did not surprise her and it shocked her to her very core. Bile rose in her throat, and "It's more than a shame," she found herself snapping, "it's a complication." And so it was, though the tragedy itself would have been quite enough to take, thank you. Inwardly, she went over and over the situation, but she might as well not have bothered, for all the good it did. There was nothing, as far as she could tell, to be done. For all her pretensions to deisticity, Lady Mary, with her painted on smiles and her sharply edged manners, would never get the inheritance that was owing to her now, and Lady Edith, a kinder girl, perhaps, but comparison, and yet she was soured, would suffer another crushing blow to her already blackening heart. Was spite in Edith's nature, she wondered, or was she just another spirit fragments, like cut glass shattered on flagged floor tiles? She ought not to care, she told herself, but she found she could not help it. It mattered to her what became of the Crawleys. What became of the Countess. But she could neither admit it nor change it, so instead she feigned indifference, which was a poor substitute for either.

A shadow fell across the bottom step, and, already sickened by gloom on this miserable day, she fixed the newcomer with an appraising glare, as if to see into his very soul. He did not quiver under her icy gaze; only met it, calmly, and explained his business. He was Bates, the new valet. The name had a bitter taste to it, like absinthe unfettered. She did not like him. She would have claimed, had anyone asked her, that it was out of loyalty to Thomas, but there was something else, too, something that made her stomach churn and set her teeth on edge.

"It's such a terrible thing, O'Brien," her lady sighed, as the maid attended her, and "Yes, Milady," she intoned, dutifully, as the Countess pressed a weary hand to her brow, in a rare moment of vulnerability, and, for once, she was not grand, or composed, or well-mannered, but merely, and beautifully, broken. Her grief was overpowering her, dragging her slowly, inexorably, below the surface, along with all those others, whose safety procedures had not been adhered to, whose life boats had not been filled, and now, whose new lives remained unlived, and would do until the end of time. Cora Crawley ought to have lived a charmed life, and she was good in the purest sense of the word, but goodness in its essence was not unsusceptible to suffer, and so it was that, from now on, her life would always be a little bit harder, the cross she bore a little bit heavier, perhaps until she breathed her last, and would finally relinquish her responsibilities to her far more jaded daughter. After a beat, she looked up, her eyes bright once more, her smile firmly back in place, though it wobbled, almost imperceptibly, and Sarah wanted to take her in her arms, but she did not, for she was a servant, and servants did what they were told, and not what they wanted to do.

And so she carried on with her duties, as best she could, and the weeks turned into months, and her fear did not subside. Bates remained, despite all her schemes and contrivances, and "Does anyone else keep dreaming about the Titanic?" the kitchen maid asked, and she scoffed, though night after night she tossed and turned, haunted by the ghosts of all those poor souls lost at sea.


	3. Morbidity

**A/N: I'm sorry if there are any glaring anachronisms in this chapter. I refer to Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, which I don't own.**

Once upon a time, anything had seemed possible. She had been blessed with looks, charm, wit, and, most importantly of all, or so they would have had her believe, money. And plenty of it. When an English earl had made his bid for her in the midst of her first season, she had no reason to believe her life would not be something of a fairy tale. She had spent her childhood dreaming of princes, and castles, and living happily ever after, and here was her very own blue-blooded aristocrat, complete with ancient ancestral pile and wicked mother-in-law to boot.

Her own mother had leapt at Robert's offer without pausing for breath, and Martha Levinson never not had her own way. As such, her daughter had always done as she was told. And it wasn't just that. She had wanted to marry him. She had wanted the fairy tale. She was still a child, barely out of school. Unlike her own children, she had had the luxury, or curse, depending on which of the girls was speaking, of having been, but she knew nothing other than what she had been told. She could recite endless stories of monarchs and mysteries, warriors and empires, passion and betrayal, but she had not experienced them. She had listened, but she had not learnt. She had existed, but she had not lived.

She had not fully known what to think, in those days, for, once her engagement had been announced, it was all anybody could talk about. The world, it seemed, was eager to tell her all about itself, far more information than she could possibly have taken in, and so she had chosen, here and there, underlining her favourite passages, marking her favourite pages, and discarded the rest, returning only to her preferred sections, again and again, until they became second nature, and she had become a contributor to the world's opinions, stinging the ears of another generation of youthful recipients. Only then, when she was older, had the world let her be. Of course, there were exceptions (she suspected that the Dowager Countess, while not necessarily as menacing as she had originally imagined, might never stop telling her what to do), but for the most part, the world recognised, now, that she was weary enough of it not to accept what it said without question, for she had chosen her own beliefs to suit her own temperament, and would far rather fight to keep them intact than endure the upheaval of changing them now.

But if the idea of coming here had ever held any romance in it, it had evaporated almost immediately. Here she was, in an enormous, empty house, with its draughty attics and its outmoded traditions, its wailing pipes and its echoing memories. She had more servants than she could count, but not a single friend. At first, she had done her best, and been far nicer to everybody than they were to her, but it was near impossible, she soon realised, to make a good impression on people that had made up their mind about you long before you had ever had the chance to impress upon them. Americans were looked down upon here, and the English were so peculiarly particular about their rules. So irreparable were they once broken that she began to feel she had been cursed all along. If ever she made a mistake, it only served to prove that she was fundamentally contemptible, and was never forgiven, and never forgotten. When she did well, it went unnoticed, for surely a Countess _ought_ to know how to behave. Was it normal, she wondered, to feel so alone among crowds? To be on the inside, and yet an outsider? They were not unkind to her, not really, not even Robert's parents. But they were still segregated, somehow, though not in any tangible way, as if they were reading the same book, but always a few sentences ahead, and they watched her, but never saw her; listened to her, but never heard her; embraced her, but never touched her.

Even her own husband was a stranger, so it seemed. Robert's love for her, which had never struck her as being particularly ardent, had soon proven to be non-existent. This life she was living, this life of her dreams, was turning into a nightmare, stuck in a loveless marriage, with no one to turn to, a long way from home. She had believed in love, if nothing else, but now she wondered if that, too, had been a fantasy. What was love, her mother would have sneered, compared to a position? And Cora certainly had that now. It was only that she did not quite fit into it, like a jigsaw piece jammed unceremoniously into the wrong space, an American ingénue in the place of an English countess.

Robert's love had come, of course, after a year or so, and she, too, had come to appreciate his company. The girls had followed, and things had started not to be so difficult. The passing of time brought with it the acceptance of her peers, as, gradually, they grew accustomed to her. And, at long last, when her old maid had retired, she had finally, _finally_ made a real friend. Perhaps it was improper to think of a servant in such a manner, but she had lived far too long and seen far too much to put barriers on affection. Robert hadn't taken to O'Brien as she did, and was constantly complaining about her, but she would not choose between them. Sometimes she thought she might trust O'Brien even more than she did her husband. Even more than she did herself. O'Brien, who had cared for and consoled her for the best part of a decade. O'Brien, who never would have seen her fortune go to some dubious distant relative that would neither know nor care if she lived or died.

As she had aged, so she had matured. Come to accept her lot. But she had lost a lot of herself in that first year. A lot of her youth, a lot of her innocence. She had been a girl when she had come here, and now she was a woman. She wondered if there really was such a thing as marriage of true minds, or if the world was made up of incomplete people, struggling to fit into each other's hearts. She and Robert got on very well, but never perfectly. They walked their lives as if on parallel paths, sometimes swerving to overlap, but always returning to course. They travelled alongside one another, rather than together, and sometimes in conjunction, but always two parts, never one whole. For we are never truly in each other's lives. We are here one moment, and gone the next, as unpredictable as the changing tides, and equally as contrary. Time only gives of itself so much, before claiming us for its own, and she had lost so much time now. So much that she could never get back. She could only rely on herself, because everyone else would leave her in the end, whether by choice or by circumstance.

She had mentioned her worries to Robert, once. Not all of them, of course, but in a general sense, about mortality, disillusionment, the futility of life. He had laughed, told her not to be morbid. It had not upset her, exactly, but it had ensured that she had never mentioned it again. There was only one other person she could share her deepest confidences with, and she didn't dare tell O'Brien. Her husband laughing at her was one thing (God knew, she ought to be used to it by now), but she wasn't sure if she could have borne it from her maid.

So she followed his advice, and tried not to be morbid. But how could she not be, when their every conversation was concerned with what would transpire once they were no more? Death pervaded the very air she breathed. She watched Robert, often, sitting at the head of the table, staring out of the bedroom window, Lord of all he surveyed. But what did that matter, when one day he would turn to dust, leaving someone else to govern the land as they saw fit, until they, too, passed on, and so it continued? It made little difference how many commodities they garnered, be they friends, riches, or expensive snuffboxes, because sooner rather than later, when they would no longer be here to enjoy them, to hold on to them. These days, she felt that time coming faster with every step she took. For she was not a princess, and this was not a fairy tale. And she would not live happily ever after. For this was real life, in which nothing but death could last forever.


End file.
